"Kafka by night is not the antithesis of Kafka by day, but an extension."
🐎 The Hippodrome
🚶 Leaning and Retreating
"Walking is falling forward. Each step is a collapse arrested, a disaster averted, a ruin forestalled. In this way, walking becomes an act of faith," wrote Paul.
— Jin Jin, Walking with Paul Salopek
"But what is the right path, father?" he asked at last. "How can a man recognize the right path?" "As long as you are guided by your fears, you will be on the right path. May God help you!"
— Milorad Pavić, Last Love in Constantinople
Borges tells us not to dream of writing the perfect work, because it is usually just a retreat.
— Tang Nuo
Setting a goal means following an unknown path toward a distant destination, while novelty only demands that we move away from places we have already been. Leaving a familiar place is not only easier and less burdensome, but it also carries richer information. We can look back at the entire history of past discoveries and use them as a reference to judge current novelty. Therefore, trusting in novelty serves as a meaningful engine driving progress.
— Kenneth Stanley & Joel Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
The demands of poetry stipulate that, driven by the desire for innovative breakthroughs, there will be a constant dialectical cycle between the difficult and the easy, the elite and the popular, the contracted and the expanded. It will not, and cannot, permanently move along that narrow path you hate and fear; if it travels the narrow path for too long, it will inevitably turn back to open the grand gates and walk the broad road. It's just that with each dialectical shift, it never returns to the starting point of the previous cycle—it continuously pioneers different ways of tightening and relaxing.
— Yang Zhao, Poetic
Only their sphere of activity grew smaller and smaller, leaving just a patch of green the size of a palm. They invented a form of exercise: after dinner, lined up shoulder to shoulder, they would walk counterclockwise in circles around this small grove, taking about a minute per lap, like spinning a prayer wheel, trampling out a path. Whatever contortions life and their superiors demanded of them, they would contort themselves accordingly.
— Jia Hangjia, Scribbles
⚙️ Mechanical Movements
I dressed and went out, visited the professor, exchanged flattering pleasantries with him—all of which was against my will. Most people, like me, are forced day after day, year after year, to act, to live, and to behave against their hearts. They visit relatives and friends, chat, and kill time sitting in government bureaus and offices. All these actions are compulsory, mechanical, reluctant—all of them could be performed by machines, or perhaps not done at all. This continuous mechanical motion obstructs me just as it obstructs them from looking critically at their own lives, from discovering and feeling the stupidity, the shallowness, the suspiciousness that bears an ugly sneer, and the hopeless sorrow and emptiness of life.
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
What evokes such mixed feelings is this: as much as Kafka loathed his job, everything related to work provided him with absolutely unique "texts" in his actual writing. Kafka by night is not the antithesis of Kafka by day, but an extension, just as K.'s Sunday is not the antithesis of a workday, but its continuation. I cannot imagine what a completely unemployed Kafka would have written. When Kafka compelled his character K. to turn his only day of rest, Sunday, into a day he ought to work, continuously punishing himself in a cyclical nightmare, was he in pain or in joy?
— Zhang Qiuzi, The Mortise and Tenon of Fiction
The achievement-subject surrenders to a compulsory freedom, or the freedom of compulsion, in order to maximize performance. Work and performance become increasingly excessive, eventually evolving into self-exploitation. This is far more efficient than external exploitation because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. There is no distinction between the perpetrator and the victim. This self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that translates into violence due to its inherent structures of compulsion. The psychiatric diseases of the achievement society are the pathological manifestations of this paradoxical freedom.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
😂 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
"Forgive my presumption, old gentleman, my name is Gustav. We took the liberty of shooting your driver. May we know your honorable name?"
The old man looked at us coldly and sorrowfully with his small gray eyes.
"I am Chief Prosecutor Loerke," he said slowly. "You have not only shot my poor driver, but you have even killed me. I feel I am dying. Why did you fire at us?"
"Because your car was going too fast."
"We were driving at a normal speed."
"What was normal yesterday is no longer normal today, Mr. Prosecutor. Today we consider the speed of any car to be too fast. We are now going to destroy cars, all cars, and all other machines as well."
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
"This gun kills those damn Filipinos," the soldier said. "It shot one of the bastards so full of holes it took two graves to bury him."
— Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster
Tamaru fell silent again for a moment, then asked, "Have you heard the story of the final exam taken by interrogators of the secret police during the Stalin era?"
"I don't think so."
"He was brought into a square room. Inside, there was nothing but a plain little wooden chair. Then his superior ordered: 'Make that chair confess, and write up the transcript. You are not to take a single step out of this room until the task is complete!'"
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
"Other doctors' patients die no less often than mine," he said. "But my patients die happy."
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth
I'll never be an outstanding private detective, and I guess one reason is that I spend too much time dreaming of Babylon.
— Richard Brautigan, Dreaming of Babylon
Does anyone know what a quail or a bustard sees when it stands looking around from the center of its territory, or when it struts about to court a mate? Scientists have conducted some experiments that give me pause for thought. They once cut off a female bird's head, stuck it on a pole, and as a result, the male bird danced around it all afternoon, waiting for it to give some kind of signal.
— Gerald Murnane, The Plains
At the time, an epidemic of smallpox broke out in El Salvador, and his Minister of Health and advisors told him the correct course of action, but he said: "I know what to do: wrap all the street lamps in the country in red paper." And so, for a time, all the street lamps in El Salvador were wrapped in red paper.
— Hou Jian, More Than Magic
As soon as I saw them pull the corpse out of the water, I shouted:
—That's me... me.
Everyone looked at me in astonishment, but I went on: "That's me... that's my watch, the watchband is stretchable... it's me."
—It's me! ... It's me!
—I shouted at them, but no one paid any attention to me, because they couldn't understand how the drowned man fished out of the river in the early morning could be me.
— Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Greguerías
🛠️ The Console
🎯 The Lonely Cheater
After starting work, I realized that some exams aren't meant to be taken seriously; they are merely team-building exercises in cheating. "They've already set up a group chat, can you pass it on your own?"
But as it turns out, the act of dozens of people dumping contradictory answers into a shared online spreadsheet for an online exam where everyone's question order is randomized, is merely the momentum of building a "human flesh calculator."
Searching for answers in internal documents isn't fast enough, and human answering (likely using AI too) isn't accurate enough. So I improvised the following workflow:
Step Zero: Upload the presentation slides to NotebookLM in bulk for future use.
Step One: Take multiple screenshots and upload them all at once to Google AI Studio.
Select the Gemini 3.0 Pro model and input the following system prompt:
You are now my expert exam assistant. Next, I will send you some test questions in **English** (including single-choice, multiple-choice, and true/false).
Please strictly follow these reply rules:
1. **Language Conversion**: Although the questions are in English, please reply to me **entirely in Chinese** for quick comprehension.
2. **Core Format**: Please output in the following format without any fluff:
- **[Answer]**: [Question Number] - [Option Letter] (If it's a true/false question, reply with "True/False")
- **[Key Reason]**: Explain in one sentence why this option was chosen, pointing out keywords or logical flaws in the question stem.
- **[Chinese Translation]**: Briefly translate the core meaning of the question stem (word-for-word translation is not needed).
3. **Handling Unfamiliar Domains**: If a question involves specific internal processes or acronyms of my company, please **analyze the logical differences between the options**, use the process of elimination to deduce the most reasonable answer, and mark "(Based on logical deduction)" in your reasoning.
**Please be ready now; I will send the first question.**
Step Two: Follow-up prompts in each round:
For questions you are unsure about, please return the OCR results.
Step Three: Save the text-based questions and ask NotebookLM one by one.
The beauty of this workflow is that it ensures speed through bulk image uploads (since the test is timed) while guaranteeing accuracy with a knowledge base. Of course, if you genuinely need to learn this knowledge, you can use NotebookLM for conversational learning.
Rather than cheating, I am more repulsed by joining the group chat.